


A Good Man

by CotyCat82



Series: The Good & The Bad [1]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 05:40:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4379399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CotyCat82/pseuds/CotyCat82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daniel is feeling insecure about being with Peggy, but not because of his leg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Good Man

**Author's Note:**

> I had started this with the intention of writing smut. That is clearly not what came out. I may give this a go later from Peggy's perspective and see if that works. 
> 
> A big thank you to Indigowild who was gracious enough to edit this and who made it a better piece.

Of course, he’d never been with a woman. Not before, during, or after the war. That was something that did cross his mind when he was lying in the field hospital, knowing that it could go either way for him, but he’d frankly been in too much pain to dwell on it at the time.

He knew it’d been the biggest fear among some of the men: dying a virgin. And a lot of them acted accordingly. Some married before the war or on furlough. Others made promises they didn’t intend to keep to girls back home. Then there were the lot that either paid for it or enjoyed the “gratitude” of the girls abroad who’d only been too happy to “celebrate” with the American GI’s that had liberated them.

It’s not like he didn’t have more than his fair share of chances. Or that he felt he had some kind of moral high ground to maintain. It had simply been how he was raised. His parents had brought him up to be a good boy, setting him on what they’d hoped would be a path to make Daniel a good man. And good men should love the woman that they took to bed.

So, Daniel was still a virgin when he first met Peggy Carter because he’d never been in love before. But Peggy Carter had been in love before and not been a virgin when she first met Daniel Sousa.

Steve Rogers, of course. He’d never asked for the details and she’d never offered them. Best not to think of her with that perfect porcelain skin, dark hair, and those chocolate eyes in a tangled dance of legs and arms and bodies with the golden-haired, tanned and blue-eyed man who was the opposite in features of Peggy, but alike in heart.

No, that image would only make Daniel, darkly handsome but once tall and straight himself, feel inadequate now that he would never stand proudly again on his own two feet unaided.

Not that he was jealous per se. Loving Steve Rogers and losing him had helped shape Peggy into the person she was now. It had ultimately led her to him. And those experiences, her love of the skinny boy from Brooklyn not the American Adonis, was why Daniel had fallen so hard for her to begin with. He couldn’t and wouldn’t begrudge her what must be tender memories.

But if he was honest with himself, sitting on the bed in his skivvies, waiting for Peggy to emerge from the bathroom with his stump bare for her to see, he wished he’d had at least some experience to bring to the table...er bed. Some practical notion of the logistics of this and how to please Peggy, besides what she had already told him. Some experience gained on how to do this back when he’d been a whole person with two complete legs, because he knew that only having one knee was going to make this awkward enough. Throwing in that he was a virgin, something that seemed to have surprised Peggy, was only going to make that awkwardness worse.

They’d talked about it of course. Practical, pragmatic Peggy had approached it just like any other problem to be solved.

“We can wait.” she’d told him, “for as long as you need to be comfortable and ready.” And she’d meant it, but he’d told her that he didn’t want to do that.

“Ten days, ten month, ten years. I’m going to be nervous no matter what,” he’d told her plainly. “And I don’t want to wait. I think we both know firsthand that there might not be a tomorrow to wait for. I don’t want to miss out on anything with you.”

She’d smiled, gently, sadly, at that and reached out to take his hand, asking specifically just what he was nervous about. “The leg?”

“You mean the lack of? Partly.”

“Being a virgin?”

“That too.”

“Neither of those things are shameful, Daniel. Truly. I am honored that you want to share this experience for the first time with me.” That had made him feel much better. Her immediate launch into a discussion of the logistics of how it would work, however, had not.

“It will be easy enough,” she’d said. “I’ll just have to be on top until we get our bearings and figure out your limitations.” She’d gone on to talk about the precautions they’d take to prevent pregnancy and the location and timing of their rendezvous with such cool efficiency it felt more like a business deal to Daniel than the coming together of two people who cared about each other.

It had felt hollow somehow, cold and while not exactly empty, definitely not as fulfilling as he had thought it would be either. And that is not what he wanted from Peggy Carter at all. She’d never been particularly demonstrative, stiff-upper English lip and all, but this somehow seemed like it should be more than what she’d run over when they talked about. It seemed like it should be bigger, grander, more meaningful than the practicalities that she’d gone over in such fine detail.

He’d was wondering how to tell her just that when she finally emerged from the bathroom, dressed in some kind of satin and lace green “thing” that was practically transparent. He felt his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed deeply. Trying to remember what the hell he’d just been thinking, what he’d been planning to say to her, angry at his body for clouding his mind.

She _sashayed_ over to him, hips swinging and breasts, unrestrained by anything, bouncing lightly up and down. Daniel felt his mouth open a bit. Forget about having a conversation or making coherent sentences, he just hoped he wasn’t drooling.

He’d been resting against the headboard, legs outstretched on the bed, when she surprised the hell out him by lifting his arm, and curling up against his side like a demure kitten, tucking herself into the curve of his body. It may have been the most intimate thing he’d ever experienced in his life. When she leaned her head into the crook of his neck, her breath warm against it and her lashes kissing his skin as her eyes closed, he felt the complete and utter trust she was giving him. And Peggy was not a woman who trusted easily.

“Do you remember the incident in the office kitchen with the toaster?” she finally asked. The words shocked him out of his inner dialogue. Not just because he was surprised to hear her voice, but because that embarrassing fiasco was the last thing he thought she’d bring up now.

“Yeah.” How the hell could he forget it? Not that there was much to it. His crutch had hit a puddle on the kitchen floor and came out from underneath him. To keep from falling he had caught himself on the counter, knocking over and breaking the toaster in the process.

It had been embarrassing as hell. He’d been relatively new to the SSR then and was frankly still getting used to the crutch. It had taken him months to live down. He’d very nearly quit over it because it took a long damn time for everyone to stop bringing it up every damn day.

“Hard to forget,” he said as neutrally as he could, hoping to not sound bitter.

“That’s when I knew you were a good person,” she continued, not moving from the little nook in his body that she’d claimed for herself.

“How’s that?”

“I knew you weren’t like the others then, because of how you responded to it - with everyday heroism.”

“Come again?” He said trying to pull back and see her expression, but all he could see was her hair.

She must have felt his motion, but she didn’t pull back to look at him just yet. “Steve once told me that he thought real heroism was the quiet courage people showed in everyday adversity. I didn’t understand it at first, but I know now he was right, as he often was. Bravery is going on with your day, with your life, no matter how hard it is. It’s about not giving up or getting bitter when the world seems to be against you. But it’s mainly about doing right by others, even as they don’t do right by you.”

She pulled back at that to look at him. “Steve always stood up for the little guy, even when he was just the little guy himself, because it was the right thing to do. And just by coming back to the office every day and doing your job well and professionally, despite those morons taunting you, you were doing to the same thing. You were giving better than you got. That’s when I knew you weren’t like the others, and I started to like you then, even when I didn’t really want to.”

Her words hung between them for a bit before he spoke again. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I’m working myself up to tell you something else. And it seemed like a good place to start, telling you about when I came to first like and respect you.”

“Working yourself up to tell me...?”

“To tell you when I knew I was in love with you.”

He went as stiff as a board. They’d never said that word before. Oh, he’d come close, nearly a thousand times. Even before she had taken him up on that offer of a drink, which was the first indication he’d had that his feelings for her might not be completely one-sided, he’d known he loved her. But he had never really thought she’d ever feel that way about him. Not truly. He assumed that he’d always be a distant second in her heart. That, as good as they got on, as willing and eager as she seemed to be to go to bed with him, that she’d just be fond of him. Maybe even willing to spend her life or part of it with him, but never actually be in love with him. And it occurred to him then that that was what he’d really been so damn nervous about. Not the actual act of being together, but the fact that she might not be here with him for the reason he wanted her to be: because she loved him too.

“And when did you know that?” he asked, not even attempting to hide the awed delight in his tone.

“When you let Howard give you your new leg.”

“Are you serious?” he said, pulling further back from her to see if she was kidding him.

Her billionaire inventor friend had just shown up one day to the SSR with a brown paper bag under his arm. Inside was a custom built prosthesis Stark had made just for him as a thank you, an apology really, for his help in the whole Midnight Oil affair.

Stark had ushered him into the conference room to try it on. Daniel didn’t think for a damn second the thing would actually fit. It had taken months at the VA to get the one he had to sort of connect properly with what was left of his leg, but Stark’s went on like a glove. Lighter and made out of some kind of special metal alloy, it was more comfortable than his mostly wooden one, and Daniel could tell it wouldn’t cause any of the painful sores the government-issued one did.

But more importantly, he could walk in it without the crutch. Not well. Not fast. It was an ugly, sort of stutter-stop movement, but for him it might as well have been flying. He had never thought he’d walk without his crutch again. And that was how Peggy had found them that day, Stark sitting back in a conference chair pleased as punch with himself and Daniel doing laps about the table.

“You were just so happy.”

He waited a moment. Waiting for more. Some insight as to how that unremarkable moment proved that he was worthy of her remarkable love.

“That’s it?” He finally asked.

“How do you mean, that’s it? You were happy, and that made me happy. And once I knew that those two things were connected, well…that’s love isn’t it? Or at least what I think it should be.”

“I make you happy. You love me,” he repeated stupidly.

“Yes, thank you for summarizing, Daniel. I’d lose the plot without you.” But her tone was light, amused.

“Peggy?”

“Mmm?”

“I love you too.”

“I know that,” she said before shifting to sit on top of his lap, straddling him and then gently pushing him back on the bed. He went willingly, happily.

“I wanted to say it though. Out loud. And I want to say it often.”

“Good,” she said, leaning down to kiss him senseless.

*********************************

When Daniel Sousa woke up the next morning next to Peggy Carter, he was not only no longer a virgin, but he was in love and loved in return by a woman who may well be the best person he’d ever meet. And there was no more true, more sure way to know he was a good man than that.


End file.
